DISGRACEFUL TREATMENT
OF
ANIMALS IN PUERTO RICOThe island is littered with rotting carcasses
of dogs
thrown from bridges or buried alive. Page 2

The AP probe, which included visits to two sites where
animals were slaughtered, found the inhumane killings were far more
extensive than that one incident. The AP saw and was told about
a scale and brutality far beyond even what animal welfare activists
suspected, stretching over the last eight years.

A $22.5 million lawsuit against Animal Control Solutions
and city officials - including those who helped round up the animals
- was filed on behalf of 16 Barceloneta families whose dogs or cats
were seized under rules prohibiting pets at the city projects. The
animals' deaths show "a cold and depraved heart and has stirred
public outrage around the whole world," the lawsuit says.

Julio Diaz, owner of Animal Control Solutions and
a co-founder of another company, Pet Delivery, declined AP requests
for an interview but told reporters there is no proof his company
was responsible for the Barceloneta pet massacre. "We have
never thrown animals off any place," he said.

A police investigation into the Barceloneta killings
has not led to charges, but police Sgt. Wilbert Miranda, who heads
the probe, said the information gathered so far indicates Animal
Control Solutions was responsible. He declined to give details.

Maria Kortright, a lawyer involved in the suit, said
it's clear the pets Animal Control Solutions removed from Barceloneta
were the same ones hurled off the bridge because the survivors have
been identified by their owners.

"Last Tuesday, I saw one of the survivors back
at its home," Kortright said.

Animal welfare activists have complained to government
agencies for years about allegations of improper disposal of animals,
but say officials didn't act. Preventive action also is almost nonexistent:
Puerto Rico has at least 100,000 stray dogs and cats - and no island-wide
spaying or neutering programs.

Activist Alfredo Figueroa said the animal disposal
companies acted with impunity because government agencies ignored
allegations of cruelty, rather than investigate the companies or
address the overpopulation of strays.

"There is apathy," Figueroa said. "No
one wants to take responsibility."

A former employee of one of Diaz's companies told
the AP that the firms rounded up thousands of animals over the years,
brutally killed many of them and discarded the corpses wherever
it was convenient. One of the former employees led the AP to two
different killing fields and he and another former employee described
a third.

"Not a single animal was turned over to a shelter,"
a former dogcatcher for Animal Control Solutions told the AP. Both
he and an ex-employee of Pet Delivery, who was interviewed separately,
spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Both said
they left the animal disposal jobs voluntarily.

The AP contacted all eight animal shelters and sanctuaries
across Puerto Rico, and they confirmed that none had received animals
for potential adoption from Diaz's companies.

Diaz co-founded Pet Delivery in 1999 and created Animal
Control Solutions in 2002. Pet Delivery appears to be defunct, having
reported no earnings since 2004. Facing little competition, the
companies had 85 contracts with municipalities and other clients
worth $1.1 million in the past eight years, according to the Puerto
Rican comptroller's office.

The AP could find no sign that any of the municipalities
checked to make sure the companies dealt with the strays humanely.

"It wasn't our responsibility," said Edwin
Arroyo, special assistant to the mayor of Barceloneta, which paid
Animal Control Solutions up to $20,000 per year and in October hired
the company to remove banned pets from housing projects - allegedly
the ones that wound up at the bottom of the bridge.

The pet disposal scandal adds to Puerto Rico's poor
reputation for treatment of animals. Cockfighting is legal, with
matches shown on television. One of the island's beaches is known
as Dead Dog Beach - a place where teenagers drive over live puppies
sealed in bags or cruelly kill them with machetes and arrows, according
to animal welfare groups that photographed the atrocities.

Figueroa says he met Diaz in 1999 and introduced him
to city officials in Fajardo. The city then awarded Pet Delivery
a contract to remove strays. But Figueroa said he later learned
that Diaz's company also was removing pets with collars and ID tags,
and dumping their bodies in a field.

"Crying children, old people, a sick woman were
all calling us, thinking we were involved," Figueroa said.

A former Animal Control Solutions employee told the
AP that he witnessed another worker in 2005 dragging 12 to 15 small
dogs out of a van along a road outside San Juan. Normally, workers
injected animals with a euthanasia drug but on this day there was
none. The animals were instead given an overdose of a sedative and
flung 50 feet into a trash-filled gully. Some of the dogs were alive
as they crashed on top of junked beds, bottles and other garbage.

"I could hear some of the dogs whimpering as
they hit the tree branches and then the ground," the former
employee said as he stood with AP journalists in the muck at the
site, which still holds the stench of death.

Not all the dogs died, however. A dog that was not
a stray, but a sickly pet whose owner wanted it euthanized, managed
to limp home. The angry owner telephoned the company and demanded
it retrieve the dog and do the job right, the former employee recalled.

The former employee also showed AP reporters a highway
rest stop near a gorge outside the town of Cayey where, he said,
workers would inject dogs. At the edge of the gorge lay the skeletal
remains of more than a dozen dogs amid matted fur and two dog collars
with no tags.

Asked if the number of dogs and cats killed by Animal
Control Solutions was in the hundreds, the former employee shook
his head.

"It is in the thousands," he said. "On
a good month, we would pick up 900."

One dog, stuffed in a sack, was found recently at
the Cayey site among other bagged carcasses. It apparently survived
the fall and managed to poke its head out of the bag before dying,
said Carmen Cintron, who runs an animal shelter.

"I am having nightmares when I think about what
that poor dog went through before it died," Cintron said.

Until 2003, Pet Delivery ran a shelter where workers
injected strays, often not knowing what the drugs were or their
proper doses, the former employee of that company told the AP.

Some animals were adopted from the shelter, but others
- including puppies and kittens - were euthanized, the ex-employee
said. Euthanizing animals that cannot be adopted is standard practice
in pet shelters, but the former employee said animals at Pet Delivery's
shelter were inhumanely killed.

"Any available employee at that moment would
use the drug that was available and they were thrown half dead into
a hole, and that's why there were some live dogs among them,"
he said. "What he (Diaz) had us do was to throw dirt on top
of the live dogs along with the dead ones, so they all would die."

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